Calvert DeForest as Larry “Bud” Melman giving hot towels out at the Port Authority as people get off the bus. Nov. 16, 1983

David Letterman pays tribute to the late Calvert Deforest (aka Larry “Bud” Melman)

Little has been published about his early life. He was born to Calvert Martin DeForest, M.D., a physician who died in 1949, and Mabelle (Taylor) DeForest. He was a cousin of actor DeForest Kelley of Star Trek fame, and Bebe Daniels, a silent film star who survived the introduction of sound. Radio pioneer Lee De Forest was Daniels’s second cousin. The exact family connection of Lee De Forest to Calvert DeForest is unclear.

DeForest attended Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn, New York. He worked for many years for the large pharmaceutical company Parke Davis, which was later acquired by Pfizer. He had aspirations of acting but was discouraged by his mother, who was briefly an actress herself. After her death in 1969, DeForest did part-time backstage work, which eventually led to acting work.

Work with David Letterman

He is credited with four films from 1972 to 1982 and, after his first appearance with David Letterman, appeared in 15 other films or television shows.

The Associated Press noted: “DeForest’s gnomish face was the first to greet viewers when Letterman’s NBC show debuted on February 1, 1982, offering a parody of the prologue to the Boris Karloff film Frankenstein. ‘It was the greatest thing that had happened in my life,’ he once said of his first Letterman appearance.”

The Melman character also opened Letterman’s first CBS show under his own name, but as essentially the same character, when Letterman moved from NBC to CBS in 1993. The name change was made because the character of “Larry ‘Bud’ Melman” was considered the intellectual property of NBC. Melman also appeared as “Kenny The Gardener”. He continued to appear on Letterman’s show until his 81st birthday in 2002 before retiring from acting. DeForest often “drew laughs by his bizarre juxtaposition as a Late Show correspondent at events such as the 1994 Winter Olympics in Norway and the Woodstock anniversary concert that year.” One of DeForest’s more memorable skits came on Letterman’s May 13, 1994, show. The host stated Johnny Carson would announce the evening’s Top 10 list, at which point DeForest, as Melman, appeared as “Johnny Carson.” On DeForest’s exit, the real Johnny Carson appeared in what would prove Carson’s last television appearance. DeForest was also noted for his remote interviews in which he would ask the interviewee a question, but pitch the microphone to the interviewee too quickly, resulting in a fade out of the last part of the question.

Letterman noted after DeForest’s death: “Everyone always wondered if Calvert was an actor playing a character, but in reality he was just himself: a genuine, modest and nice man. To our staff and to our viewers, he was a beloved and valued part of our show, and we will miss him.” When asked how he’d like to be remembered, DeForest responded “Just being able to make people laugh and knowing people enjoyed my humor. I also hope I haven’t offended anyone through the years.”

Other appearances

He was co-host (in charge of the digital switcher) on the local SF Bay Area radio program, 10@10, on KFOG-FM with Dave Morey.

In 1989, he appeared in the Special Ed video for the song “Think About it” as the villainous Dr. Norecords.

In 1994, he wrote a humor book called Cheap Advice.

DeForest also appeared on the hit albums Americana and Ixnay on the Hombre by The Offspring, doing some of the voices that can be heard before and after certain tracks. In late March 2007, a 20-minute clip of DeForest recording the voices for their album was posted on The Offspring’s website.

He appeared at Woodstock 1994 to announce Nine Inch Nails late night set by proclaiming, “Ladies and gentlemen, punch your balls off and please welcome Nine Inch Nails!”

The definition of slavery is not nearly as clear as it used to be when we could see the physical chains and whips that shackled human laborers. Therefore, it’s more vital than ever to identify the abstract ways in which humanity is confined. Here are ten signs you might be a modern-day slave

Back in January, a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology appeared to prove that ESP is real, that in certain circumstances (involving, as it happens, erotic pictures) people really can predict the future. Naturally, this got more attention than your average academic publication. At the time I talked to the author of the paper, Daryl J. Bem, who was reeling from all the media attention. Now that nearly a year has passed, I wanted to see if any replications had been published. I e-mailed Stuart Ritchie, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of Edinburgh, who, along with two colleagues, ran Bem’s experiments but didn’t get the same results. Their subjects couldn’t predict the future. This has been noted on blogs but, according to Ritchie, he and his colleagues haven’t had any success getting their paper published.

Thousands of Twitter accounts apparently created in advance to blast automated messages are being used to drown out Tweets sent by bloggers and activists this week who are protesting the disputed parliamentary elections in Russia, security experts said. Amid widespread reports of ballot stuffing and voting irregularities in the election, thousands of Russians have turned out in the streets to protest. Russian police arrested hundreds of protesters who had gathered in Moscow’s Triumfalnaya Square, including notable anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny. In response, protesters began tweeting their disgust in a Twitter hashtag #триумфальная (Triumfalnaya), which quickly became one of the most-tweeted hashtags on Twitter.

✦ Cosmic Cycles of Violence: John Lennon and Dimebag Darrell Gunned Down on December 8

Behind the lead Beatle’s circular granny glasses and tireless promotion of peace burned a fury unmatched by most metal enthusiasts. Lennon was pissed at his parents, pissed at his bandmates, pissed at his stay-at-home wife, pissed at Her Majesty the Queen, pissed at America’s war machine, pissed at the world for not giving peace a chance. Lennon was fucking hostile. But neither Dimebag nor Lennon were as pissed as the two pistol-wielding schizophrenics who made them into rock star martyrs, both on December 8, twenty-four years apart.

A U.S.-based research institute will soon publish what it says is “indisputable” evidence that Israel stole weapons-grade uranium for its still-undeclared atomic weapons program from a nuclear reprocessing plant in western Pennsylvania. The Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep) will release this month a 300-page report detailing the initial findings of a multi-year research project investigating the disappearance of highly enriched uranium from the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (Numec) in Apollo, Pennsylvania in the 1950s and 1960s.

Imagine if the US government, with no notice or warning, raided a small but popular magazine’s offices over a Thanksgiving weekend, seized the company’s printing presses, and told the world that the magazine was a criminal enterprise with a giant banner on their building. Then imagine that it never arrested anyone, never let a trial happen, and filed everything about the case under seal, not even letting the magazine’s lawyers talk to the judge presiding over the case. And it continued to deny any due process at all for over a year, before finally just handing everything back to the magazine and pretending nothing happened. I expect most people would be outraged. I expect that nearly all of you would say that’s a classic case of prior restraint, a massive First Amendment violation, and exactly the kind of thing that does not, or should not, happen in the United States.

SICK collectors are fuelling an appalling trade in Holocaust memorabilia – with personal items of gas chamber victims changing hands for thousands of pounds. Dolls clutched by children in Nazi death camps, money used by inmates in medieval-style ghettos, yellow Stars of David that singled out Jews for persecution — all are enough to set the enthusiasts’ pulses racing. One US website seen by The Sun offers a variety of the yellow stars that Adolf Hitler made Jews wear before they were sent off to be gassed. An armband which Nazis made homosexual inmates wear in the Auschwitz concentration camp sold on eBay recently for £97.

The physics buzz reached a frenzy in the past few days over the announcement that the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva is planning to release what is widely expected to be tantalizing—although not conclusive—evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson, the elementary particle hypothesized to be the origin of the mass of all matter.

Once the caliber, gauge and other ammunition parameters have been selected, we will ask you (by way of your funeral service provider) to send approximately one pound of the decedents ash to us. Upon receiving the ashes our professional and reverent staff will place a measured portion of ash into each shotshell or cartridge. (Please note that our process uses only a portion of the ash from a typical cremation.)

It’s an issue we and others have noted again and again: Years after the financial crisis, there have still been no prosecutions of top executives at the major players in the financial crisis. Why’s that? Well, according to a now-departed Justice Department official who used to be in charge of investigating such matters, the Justice Department has decided that holding top Wall Street executives criminally accountable is too difficult a task. David Cardona, who recently left the FBI for a job at the Securities and Exchange Commission, told the Wall Street Journal that bringing financial wrongdoing to account is “better left to regulators,” who can bring civil cases. Civil cases, of course, can produce penalties from the banks — as well as promises to be on better behavior — but don’t put any executives behind bars.

91 year-old Al Jaffee is best known as the inventor of the MAD “Fold-In” which he started in 1964 and has been doing ever since. He is the author of 8 volumes of Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions. A month prior to this performance interviewed him on stage at Drew University and told him about an upcoming live comics reading I was producing. Not missing a beat, Jaffe goes “I’d like to try that.” In the car back from the talk, we decided on doing some of Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions live and voila.

Domestic violence goes bad when a wanna be hustler get tries to beat up his girlfriend she turns the tables and she then winds up beating him down.

An Islamic cleric residing in Europe said that women should not be close to bananas or cucumbers, in order to avoid any “sexual thoughts.” The unnamed sheikh, who was featured in an article on el-Senousa news, was quoted saying that if women wish to eat these food items, a third party, preferably a male related to them such as their a father or husband, should cut the items into small pieces and serve. He said that these fruits and vegetables “resemble the male penis” and hence could arouse women or “make them think of sex.” Bikyamasr.com cannot independently verify the accuracy of the news item at time of writing. He also added carrots and zucchini to the list of forbidden foods for women.

Earlier this year, game maker Activision counted up that 62 billion people had been ‘killed’ virtually in online games of Call of Duty: Black Ops – including 242 million stabbed to death at close range. That’s just one title among hundreds of modern war games – most of which lack any kind of ‘surrender’ button bar switching the machine off. Now, a committee of the Red Cross is debating if gamers might be violating the International Humanitarian Law as they slaughter each other online.

“These are very talented people,” said Professor Giuliana Mazzoni, lead researcher on the project. “They can change their perception and experience of the world in ways that the rest of us cannot.” Changing one’s experience at will can be a very useful ability. Studies have already shown that hypnotic suggestions are effective for blocking pain and increasing the effectiveness of psychotherapy.

This weekend at Newsfoo, a fun little future-of-news (un)conference put on by O’Reilly Media, I proposed a session. Important sidenote: It’s an “unconference” because anyone can propose a session and structure it however they like. I proposed “Reporting the End of the World.” Quite literally, how we as journalists will do our work in the apocalypse. It is almost 2012, after all, we should be prepared. What began as a relatively fun conceit quickly turned into a discussion of very practical things, best illustrated by how our corroborating examples began increasingly to be localized apocalypses like 9-11 or Katrina. Particularly with the scenario of global pandemic, we found ourselves unearthing critical weaknesses in our abilities to do our jobs amidst catastrophe.

✦ Inside Romania’s secret CIA prison

In northern Bucharest, in a busy residential neighborhood minutes from the center of Romania’s capital city, is a secret that the Romanian government has tried for years to protect. For years, the CIA used a government building — codenamed Bright Light — as a makeshift prison for its most valuable detainees. There, it held al-Qaida operatives Khalid Sheik Mohammad, the mastermind of 9/11, and others in a basement prison before they were ultimately transferred to Guantanamo Bay in 2006, according to former U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the location and inner workings of the prison.

A woman who became notorious for shooting her lover’s wife in the face is hoping to start a new life as a stripper. Amy Fisher, better known as the Long Island Lolita, is moving to Boca Raton, Florida, with her husband and three children and dreams of becoming a soccer mom. The 37-year-old former porn star has secured a stripping gig at a West Palm Beach club this week, which is charging a $10 cover.

Tucked away in a small warehouse on a dead-end street, an Internet pioneer is building a bunker to protect an endangered species: the printed word.Brewster Kahle, 50, founded the nonprofit Internet Archive in 1996 to save a copy of every Web page ever posted. Now the MIT-trained computer scientist and entrepreneur is expanding his effort to safeguard and share knowledge by trying to preserve a physical copy of every book ever published.

“There is always going to be a role for books,” said Kahle as he perched on the edge of a shipping container soon to be tricked out as a climate-controlled storage unit. Each container can hold about 40,000 volumes, the size of a branch library. “We want to see books live forever.”

In scenes reminiscent of the Great Depression these are the ramshackle homes of the desperate and destitute U.S. families who have set up their own ‘Tent City’ only an hour from Manhattan.More than 50 homeless people have joined the community within New Jersey’s forests as the economic crisis has wrecked their American dream.

And as politicians in Washington trade blows over their country’s £8.8 trillion debt, the prospect of more souls joining this rag tag group grows by the day.

Building their own tarpaulin tents, Native American teepees and makeshift balsa wood homes, every one of the Tent City residents has lost their job.

China and Arab countries have generally been scrutinized in the media for their land deals, but much of the cash flow comes through U.S. and European investors, according to Oakland Institute—through established pension funds, agribusiness behemoths and even educational institutions.

Facebook is a living computer nightmare. Just as viruses took the advantages of sharing information on floppies and modems and revealed a devastating undercarriage to the whole process, making every computer transaction suspect… and just as spyware/malware took advantage of beautiful advances in computer strength and horsepower to turn your beloved machine of expression into a gatling gun of misery and assholery… Facebook now stands as taking over a decade and a half of the dream of the World Wide Web and turning it into a miserable IT cube farm of pseudo human interaction, a bastardized form of e-mail, of mailing lists, of photo albums, of friendship. While I can’t really imply that it was going to be any other way, I can not sit by and act like this whole turn of events hasn’t resulted in an epidemic of ruin that will have consequences far-reaching from anything related to archiving.

And now it has come to this: For the first time ever, Burning Man has literally sold out.Organizers were forced to cap the number of attendees to the weeklong event, an art-focused, community-centric festival that starts Aug. 29. The event sold out last week, giving rise to a profitable black market that some past Burning Man participants say goes against the festival’s principles.

The cap on ticket sales was necessary to limit attendance as required by the permit issued by the federal Bureau of Land Management. That permit allows for 50,000 people at any one time, organizers said, and more than 51,500 tickets were sold last year.

If you’d like to go out with a bang, Holy Smoke LLC offers to pack your cremated ashes (or those of your loved ones) into ammunition cartridges. You tell them the caliber or gauge, ship the remains to them, and they’ll load the cartridges:Once the caliber, gauge and other ammunition parameters have been selected, we will ask you (by way of your funeral service provider) to send approximately one pound of the decedant’s ash to us. Upon receiving the ashes our professional and reverant staff will place a measured portion of ash into each shotshell or cartridge.[…]

Amy Winehouse was in the process of secretly adopting an adorable Caribbean child — hoping to save her from her impoverished life — just before the tragic singer died, the little girl’s family said.Bright-eyed Dannika Augustine, 10, of St. Lucia, had caught the eye of the 27-year-old “Rehab” crooner during one of the singer’s many jaunts to the island and was going to be formally adopted by Winehouse before the troubled star died in her London pad on July 23, London’s Mirror newspaper reported yesterday.

Graduate student Kevin Beiler has uncovered the extent and architecture of this network through the use of new molecular tools that can distinguish the DNA of one fungal individual from another, or of one tree’s roots from another. He has found that all trees in dry interior Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var. glauca) forests are interconnected, with the largest, oldest trees serving as hubs, much like the hub of a spoked wheel, where younger trees establish within the mycorrhizal network of the old trees. Through careful experimentation, recent graduate Francois Teste determined that survival of these establishing trees was greatly enhanced when they were linked into the network of the old trees.Through the use of stable isotope tracers, he and Amanda Schoonmaker, a recent undergraduate student in Forestry, found that increased survival was associated with belowground transfer of carbon, nitrogen and water from the old trees.

On his second album, “Supreme Clientele,” Killah allegedly “copied verbatim” the Urbont-written “Iron Man Theme” on two tracks.The album was released back in 2000 (way before the recent Jon Favreau-directed movies) and it’s unclear why it took Urbont so long to sue. But he may have grown tired of seeing Killah’s name attached to his music on the Internet.

Much of the case is a typical copyright infringement claim, but Urbont throws in an unusual unfair competition allegation that caught our attention.

According to the complaint: “Defendant Ghostface is also known for the nickname, ‘Tony Starks,’ which is a take-off of the name ‘Tony Stark,’ Iron Man’s real name and true identity. In this way, Defendants’ use of Urbont’s ‘Iron Man Theme’ gives them a substantial commercial advantage by linking Ghostface to Iron Man without paying for it.”

Vice President Joe Biden joined House Democrats in lashing tea party Republicans Monday, accusing them of having “acted like terrorists” in the fight over raising the nation’s debt limit, according to several sources in the room.

Did someone blink?

Those freaked out by facial recognition technology have fresh fodder: a study from Carnegie Mellon University in which researchers were able to predict people’s social security numbers after taking a photo of them with a cheap webcam.At the head of the research team was Alessandro Acquisti, a CMU professor who pointed out in 2009 that the social security number system has a huge security flaw — social security numbers are predictable if you know a person’s hometown and date of birth. This study essentially adds a facial recognition component to that study. Acquisti, Ralph Gross and Fred Stutzman ran three experiments. In the first, they data mined Facebook for photos of people with searchable profiles. They then used that database of faces and identities when applying off-the-shelf facial recognition technology (PittPatt) to “anonymous” singles on a popular dating site. Acquisti told me in an interview last month that they were able to reidentify 15% of the digital Cupids.

Today Twitter’s CEO said they may in the future “edit out any…clearly offensive [trending topics].” He also said “we edit out any [trending topics] with obscenities.”

At first glance the photos look staged. They show stocky men stiffly clad in various outfits that include fur hats and thick coats with upturned collars — and, most importantly, sunglasses. But these photos aren’t stage props from a silly low-budget spy film, they are images snapped by members of the feared East German secret state police, or Stasi, for an internal course called the “art of disguising.”Berlin-based artist Simon Menner unearthed the images while sifting through the Stasi archives, which were opened to the public after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was allowed to reproduce the photos and they are now on display in an exhibition entitled: “Pictures from the Secret Stasi Archives.”

Morgen Contemporary, the Berlin gallery hosting the exhibition, says in its description of the collection that “many of the snapshots seem absurd and they may even be amusing. And yet we ought not lose sight of the intention that led the Stasi agents to take them.”

It’s the future. You’re racing down the highway when, all of a sudden, the driver ahead of you slows down. You know you need to hit the brakes to avoid an accident, but your foot can’t move as fast as your brain. You’re about to rear-end the guy, except. …… except that your car has read your mind. It picks up your brain waves and automatically slows down. Accident averted.

At least 700 of these chambers have been found in Bavaria alone, along with about 500 in Austria. In the local vernacular, they have fanciful names such as “Schrazelloch” (“goblin hole”) or “Alraunenhöhle” (“mandrake cave”). They were supposedly built by elves, and legend has it that gnomes lived inside. According to some sagas, they were parts of long escape tunnels from castles.

✭ Quadriplegic man dies in Mont. skydiving accident

A quadriplegic man with five years of skydiving experience died in a weekend skydiving accident in northwestern Montana, Flathead County officials said Monday.Sheriff Chuck Curry said Zack Fogle, 27, of Kingston, Wash., died Saturday afternoon when his parachute did not open during a jump at the 44th annual Lost Prairie Boogie, a 10-day skydiving event near Marion that typically draws hundreds of participants.

“Look, Daddy, that man’s going to the bathroom!”No, not the words any daddy wants to hear from his 10-year-old daughter, especially during a stroll through their brand-new neighborhood.

Upset neighbor races his pigs during prayer in protest of new mosque

We’re under constant scrutiny—our movements monitored by cameras, tracked by satellites and catalogued by a host of increasingly attentive government agencies. No longer does the idea of an omnipresent government seem all that farfetched. As technology becomes ever more sophisticated, the idea of a total surveillance society moves further from the realm of George Orwell’s science fiction fantasy into an accepted way of life.In fact, surveillance has become a huge moneymaking industry in itself, with many sectors having sprung up devoted to developing increasingly sophisticated gadgets to keep targeted individuals under surveillance, with or without their cooperation. The science behind this technology is particularly brilliant.

If there’s one place a James Bond villain — or even some actual governments — would love raiding today, it’s the basement of a somber building in lower Manhattan: the world’s biggest gold vault.Gold prices hit a record $1,632.8 an ounce Friday, reflecting a nervous rush by private and national investors from stocks, dollars and euros to the safe-haven commodity.

And the biggest single pile of the stuff on the planet lies deep beneath the New York branch of the US Federal Reserve Bank, a stone’s throw from the Stock Exchange.

On a visit, a guide from the bank revealed the 7,000-ton hoard gleaming softly in a vault carved from Manhattan’s bed rock, five stories under the Big Apple’s teeming streets.

You could call it “My Big Fat Computer Geek Wedding.”After a Houston couple couldn’t get a friend to serve as the minister at their wedding, they decided to create their own.

When Miguel Hanson and his fiancee, Diana Wesley, get married on Saturday, a computer will conduct the ceremony. Well, technically, a computer program Hanson wrote will serve as the minister.

During the wedding, to be held in the Houston home of Hanson’s parents, the couple will stand before a 30-inch monitor in the backyard. In a robotic voice, the computer will greet the guests, say how the couple met and go through the ceremony.

After the recent Vancouver riots, it became clear that the world is surveiling itself at an unprecedented scale. Angry citizens gave police one million photos and 1,000 hours of video footage to help them track down the rioters. If we aren’t living in a surveillance state run by the government, we’re certainly conducting a huge surveillance experiment on each other.

Which is what makes two new apps, CopRecorder and OpenWatch, and their Web component, OpenWatch.net, so interesting. They are the brainchildren of Rich Jones, a 23-year-old Boston University graduate who describes himself as “pretty much a hacker to the core.” Flush with cash and time from a few successful forays into the app market, nine months ago Jones decided to devote some of his time to developing what he calls “a global participatory counter-surveillance project which uses cellular phones as a way of monitoring authority figures.” Thanks Billoney

On July 17, a man was found inside the toilet of a Porta-Potty at a yoga festival in Boulder, Colorado. The suspect is a thin, Caucasian male in his 20s with dark hair and a leather bracelet on each wrist. He was seen wearing only a pair of dark grey sweatpants. Security was called after a woman reported noticing someone in the toilet tank. A man covered in feces and with cuts on his back and legs was seen fleeing the scene.

Nostradamus, whose name means “nose of massive proportions” in Latin, is a famous prognosticator who, if he were alive today, would probably command speaking fees equivalent to what Jesus Christ or Muhammad’s agents could get them, if they were alive today, too. Out of 942 cryptic quatrains the dead French prophet set to parchment with a quill nearly 500 years ago, it’s astounding that at least four, and possibly as many as six, of his predictions sort of seem to have come at least somewhat partially true.

But she later woke up – in a coffin surrounded by sobbing relatives. She started screaming after realizing she was about to be buried alive.

Mukhametzyanov, a resident of Kazan, was rushed back to the hospital where she was declared dead — this time for real.

Ramirez arrived at the school with her son, said police spokesman Andy Skoogman. The boy went in and told officials that something was wrong with his mother and that she was too drunk to drive, according to charges filed Monday against Ramirez by the city attorney’s office.

New Mexico fire managers scrambled on Tuesday to reinforce crews battling a third day against an out-of-control blaze at the edge of one of the top U.S. nuclear weapons production centers.

The fire’s leading edge burned to within a few miles of a dump site where some 20,000 barrels of plutonium-contaminated waste, including clothing and equipment, is stored at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, fire officials said.

When the world discovered that a group of Navy SEALs called “SEAL Team 6” was responsible for killing Osama bin Laden, it’s not likely that many of them thought, “how can we trademark ‘SEAL Team 6’ to make money off of it?” Fear not, though: the Walt Disney Company did think just that.

FishbowlNY uncovered three trademark applications that Disney made in early May to claim the rights to the phrase “SEAL Team 6.”

The applications cover “entertainment and education services,” “toys, games and playthings” and “clothing, footwear and headwear.”

It remains to be seen what products will come of these trademarks, but the bin Laden raid video game and pajama set has to be just around the corner.

✪ Third worker dies at Japan’s troubled nuclear plant

The cause of the worker’s death was unknown. The man, in his 60s, was employed by one of Tokyo Electric’s contractors and started working at the plant on Friday. He was exposed to 0.17 millisieverts of radiation on Saturday, Tokyo Electric said.

The Japanese government’s maximum level of exposure for male workers at the plant is 250 millisieverts for the duration of the effort to bring it under control.

The worker fell ill 50 minutes after starting work at 6:00 a.m. on Saturday (5 p.m. EDT on Friday) and brought to the plant’s medical room unconscious. He was later moved to a nearby hospital and confirmed dead, a Tokyo Electric spokesman said.

A DeMotte woman believed to be high on bath salts allegedly told police she needed to write on the walls of a Rensselaer hotel room to protect her from evil spirits, officials said.

According to Indiana State Police, officers were called at 10:07 a.m. Wednesday to a hotel room near the intersection of Ind. 114 and Interstate 65 for a report of damage to a room.

When officers arrived, they allegedly found Tammy E. Winter, 42, of DeMotte, sitting on a bed. Winter allegedly told officers she needed to write on the walls of the hotel room to protect her from evil spirits.

A family member in the room told police Winter is a known abuser of bath salts, which are snorted and cause hallucinations.

A Cleveland man was attacked by a housecat Friday afternoon and the man’s injuries are so severe that he had to be taken by air ambulance to Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston.

When an erratic driver doesn’t show any trace of alcohol on a breathalyzer, police need expert training to tell if they are high on something else. That’s why police recently requested a whole new set of recruits — drug users.

Outside the Minneapolis Police Fifth Precinct at the corner of West 31st Street and Nicollet Avenue South, the sunset signals the beginning of a busy night for police patrolling Minnesota streets. But a select group of officers aren’t chasing crime on this night. Instead, the potential danger has come to them.

Inver Grove Heights Officer Chris Wegner is about to get some of the most valuable hands-on training of his career, dealing with people high on drugs.

The thumb drive Josue Rivera, 38, gave a Bridgeport funeral director to play at a service was supposed to be a memorial slideshow of the person who had passed away. Instead, it contained dozens of images of child pornography, according to the U.S. Marshal Violent Crime Fugitive Task Force. They arrested Rivera of Bridgeport on Tuesday and charged him with first-degree possession of child pornography. The arrest comes almost 10 months after an employee of Luz de Paz Funeral Home reviewed the drive, saw it was no memorial tribute and called Bridgeport police, the Connecticut Post reports.

Police seized Rivera’s home computer and found as many as 153 files they believe are child pornography depicting 35 children, including three videos, the Post reports.

A gang of young people call themselves the Living Dead. They terrorize the population from their small town. After an agreement with the devil, if they kill themselves firmly believing in it, they will survive and gain eternal life. Following their leader, they commit suicide one after the other, but things don’t necessarily turn out as expected.

Tom Latham enjoys riding his motorcycle with his girlfriend and loves his mother dearly, but Tom is no ordinary fellow, he is the leader of a violent, occult motorcycle gang appropriately titled “The Living Dead”. His mother and her sinister butler get their kicks out of holding séances in their home. Through her and following in his father’s footsteps, Tom makes a pact with the devil to return from the dead. One by one, he and his fellow bikers commit suicide with the goal of returning as one of the “undead”. Not all succeed. The ones who do gather together at a secret place called “The Seven Witches”, which refers to a circle of standing stones, after which they continue to terrorize the locals.

This was one of the last films of George Sanders, who committed suicide soon after making this film, in April 1972.

Despite being a very popular film amongst fans of cult British cinema, Nicky Henson is publicly very critical of Psychomania.

► The 91-Year-Old Woman Selling $60 Suicide Kits

Each of the kits Hydorn assembles by hand is a simple contraption designed for a single purpose: people kill themselves with it by encasing their head in a bag of helium, which is lethal in pure form. People like Klonoski, the son of a U.S. district judge and whose funeral was attended by more than a thousand people. The Gladd Group’s estimated annual sales are $98,000. That means Sharlotte Hydorn sells more than 1,600 suicide kits every year.

While the Obama Administration has commenced a third war in Libya and is spending billions every week in military operations from Kabul to Tripoli, it is shutting down various domestic programs for lack of funds. The latest is the Allen Telescope Array — a large number of small satellite dishes that search for extraterrestrial life in Northern California. The prohibitive cost? $1.5 million dollars a year (an additional $1 million is used on data collection and analysis). In the meantime, the Administration is refusing to yield to the latest Afghan official insisting that the country does not want or need U.S. troops and yet another case of an Afghan soldier killing U.S. personnel — this time eight U.S. soldiers and one contractor killed by one of our allies.

It is a known fact that while African Americans and white Americans use marijuana at the same statistical rate, African Americans are arrested for marijuana use at a much higher rate. Despite the fact that New York City is 60% white, white people only amount to 10% of all NYC marijuana arrests.

Think current U.S. political campaigns are nasty? The attack-pinback has long been a tool of partisans and politicos.

For years, scientists have speculated that armadillos can pass on leprosy to humans, and that they are behind the few dozen cases of the disease that occur in the U.S. every year. Now, they have evidence. A genetic study published today in The New England Journal of Medicine shows that U.S. armadillos and human patients share what seems to be a unique strain of the bacterium that causes leprosy.

He’s just so sick of being pigeon-holed as an instrument of U.S. policy. And “truth, justice, and the American way“ are ”not enough anymore.” That’s why Superman, in the latest Action Comic, has announced he is “renouncing” his U.S. citizenship.

Although he’s traditionally seen as an American hero (remember, though, he is an alien), Superman is fed up with being connected to the USA. According to the Comics Alliance blog (and reported by BoingBoing), in Action Comics #900 Superman tells the president‘s national security adviser that he’s had enough of the Red, White, and Blue

Camden, New Jersey, with a population of 70,390, is per capita the poorest city in the nation. It is also the most dangerous. The city’s real unemployment — hard to estimate, since many residents have been severed from the formal economy for generations — is probably 30 to 40 percent. The median household income is $24,600. There is a 70 percent high school dropout rate, with only 13 percent of students managing to pass the state’s proficiency exams in math. The city is planning $28 million in draconian budget cuts, with officials talking about cutting 25 percent from every department, including layoffs of nearly half the police force. The proposed slashing of the public library budget by almost two-thirds has left the viability of the library system in doubt.

In the 1990s, a researcher named Kris Pister dreamed up a wild future in which people would sprinkle the Earth with countless tiny sensors, no larger than grains of rice.

These “smart dust” particles, as he called them, would monitor everything, acting like electronic nerve endings for the planet. Fitted with computing power, sensing equipment, wireless radios and long battery life, the smart dust would make observations and relay mountains of real-time data about people, cities and the natural environment. Advertisement

Now, a version of Pister’s smart dust fantasy is starting to become reality.

On Tuesday, the Air Force issued a call for help making a miniature drone that could covertly drop a mysterious and unspecified tracking “dust” onto people, allowing them to be tracked from a distance. The proposal says its useful for all kinds of random things, from identifying friendly forces and civilians to tracking wildlife. But the motive behind a covert drone tagger likely has less to do with sneaking up on spotted owls and more to do with painting a target on the backs of tomorrow’s terrorists.

The court was told Emmanuel McPherson, 48, objected when his flatmate, James Albert Madden, played a Limp Bizkit album on Mr McPherson’s stereo.

A fight then broke out, in which Mr Madden allegedly beat Mr McPherson to death.

Navigation device maker TomTom has apologized for supplying driving data collected from customers to police to use in catching speeding motorists.

The data, including historical speed, has been sold to local and regional governments in the Netherlands to help police set speed traps, Dutch newspaper AD reported here, with a Google translation here. As more smartphones offer GPS navigation service, TomTom has been forced to compensate for declining profit by increasing sales in other areas, including the selling of traffic data.

Pretty surreal footage right now coming out of Birmingham, AL, right now of what is believed to be a 1-mile wide F4 or F5 tornado

In a museum filled with preserved abnormal fetuses, giant and dwarf skeletons, and an 8-foot colon, what makes a cabinet full of safety pins, small trinkets and other random items one of the most fascinating exhibits?

For starters, each one of these objects — and there are thousands — was swallowed and extracted. The curious can get a closer look at the carefully catalogued items at the Mütter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

The collection was assembled and donated to the museum by Chevalier Jackson, a pioneering laryngologist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

► Police dress up as doctors to test citizens

Turkish police donned white coats and stethoscopes to disguise themselves as doctors, then knocked on people’s doors to see how easily they would fall for a confidence scam.

The undercover police officers told residents of the southeastern city of Gaziantep they were screening for high blood pressure and handed out pills, according to Turkish media.

They were alarmed when residents at 86 out of 100 households visited on Tuesday swallowed the pills immediately.

Police later returned to warn residents to be more cautious.

The police pills were harmless placebos. But a local gang had been using the same technique to give people heavy sedatives and then burgle them.

It goes on: “We invite authors to use the words ‘free-living’, ‘free-ranging’ or ‘free-roaming’ rather than ‘wild animals’

“There is an obvious prejudgment here that should be avoided.”

► JON FOY’S RESURRECT DEAD

For the last six years, Jon Foy has been filming a movie about the mysterious Toynbee tiles. His documentary, Resurrect Dead, follows the investigation carried out by Justin Duerr, Steve Weinik, and Colin Smith as they set out to discover what the tiles mean and who made them. On their search, the three detectives uncovered increasingly bizarre clues: a decades old newspaper article, a David Mamet play, a Jupiter colonization organization, and a Toynbee message that “hijacked” local news broadcasts. In the end, Foy comes closer then anyone else to solving this four-decades-old mystery.

This is a strange, Twitter-borne tale of flirting, cutouts, and lack of online caution in the intelligence and defense worlds. Professionals who should’ve known better casually disclosed their personal details (a big no-no in spook circles) and lobbed allegations they later couldn’t or wouldn’t support (a big no-no in all circles). It led to a Pentagon investigation. And it starts with a Twitter account that no longer exists called @PrimorisEra.

It’s one of the biggest data breaches in history. Now that Sony has come clean — sort of — on a computer intrusion this month that exposed personal information on 77 million PlayStation Network users, one obvious question remains: Who pulled off the hack?

“Well, this is just really cool,” he said sarcastically. “A graffiti pack. Just wonderful for all of our nice friends to carry around and then in a moment or two just shoot everybody’s walls and property up.”

South Salt Lake police spokesman Garry Keller says graffiti is more of a plague than a problem.

“Some people refer to it as street art,” he said. “It’s not street art. It’s graffiti. You’re damaging somebody else’s property. It takes up their resources, their time, their money to remove it. And it’s all for nothing.”